


Confident Wreck

by racingincircles



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Malcola, Malcolm Tucker is secretly a softie and you can pry that out of my cold dead hands, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Post-Canon, Vulnerability, response fic, this accidentally approached tooth-rotting levels of fluff, title from a song by The National because of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26353051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racingincircles/pseuds/racingincircles
Summary: “You should know by now that I’m not so easy to get rid of, darling."“Stranger things have happened.”(a coda of sorts to "How to Gracefully Disappear from a Room" by Tricki)
Relationships: Nicola Murray/Malcolm Tucker
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14





	Confident Wreck

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [How to Gracefully Disappear from a Room](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17428700) by [Tricki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricki/pseuds/Tricki). 



> I've been sailing the Malcola ship ever since I finished TTOI in July, largely because of the lovely Tricki's brilliant fics. Hopefully I've got an okay grasp on the angsty, fluffy, domestic Malcola dynamic that Tricki created in the fic I call the Nationalverse for short. Much of my fic writing, on the rare occasion I actually finish it, is introspective missing scenes and drawn-out interpersonal moments like this one. I know this one-shot is extremely niche, but that seems to be my style.
> 
> I strongly suggest you read the previous fic first, although since you clicked on this one, you probably already have. I've noticed there's a solid cohort of regular Malcola fic readers and writers that's lasted several years here on AO3, and I'm glad to join the ranks.
> 
> Like its predecessor, this fic's title comes from a song by The National, specifically "You Were a Kindness" (though I also considered "Carin at the Liquor Store" and "Born to Beg").
> 
> Rated for canon-typical language.

"Malcolm. What is it, darling?"

He’s not entirely sure, to be honest. He doesn’t understand why the smile has evaporated from his face and why he can’t seem to move, even though he and his wife have just arrived at their haven, their cottage in Cumbria. He should be more relaxed than he’s been since… well, since the last time he was here.

They’ve been waiting weeks to take a well-deserved holiday. Nicola needs it more than Malcolm does — she is the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, after all — and she hadn’t stopped smiling from the moment they left Number 10 this morning until just now, as her husband’s body tenses in a way she’s never seen. She steps in front of him, tries to meet his ice-blue eyes and finds them uncharacteristically unfocused.

Malcolm wonders if he should have expected this. Some infernal fucking synapses in a corner of his brain he wishes (and had thought) he’d left in London fire missile after missile of unpleasant memories from the last time he was here. He’d been none the wiser that disaster had struck until his Blackberry lit up and Ollie Reeder’s panicked voice filled his ear.

_There’s a situation at G8._

Background noise. Broadcast journalists trying to outperform each other. Probably some security and intelligence agents chattering as well.

_… some kind of hostage situation going on…_

Paralysis, much like right now.

_… internal explosion … localised seismic activity…_

Uncertainty. Perhaps more than he’d felt in his entire life.

_We can’t find Nicola._

Panic. Definitely more than he’d felt in his entire life, borne by the utterly terrifying concept of living in a world without her in it.

“Darling?” Nicola repeats, placing a firm hand on Malcolm’s shoulder and a softer one on his face, bringing him back to reality and letting the fragments of his thoughts form something coherent. The words tumble from his mouth before they register in his brain.

"This is exactly where I was fucking standing when Ollie called and said he couldn't find yeh."

“Oh.” Nicola’s understanding of trauma has greatly increased since both her staff and her husband convinced her to see a therapist in light of the G8 incident, and she knows the inner workings of Malcolm Tucker’s mind better than anyone, so she correctly senses that for once he needs to lean on her, both figuratively and literally, instead of the other way around.

She gently extracts his suitcase from his fist, sets it on the floor and returns a careful hand to his cheek, stroking it, siphoning just a bit of the distress from his face before wrapping both arms around his wiry torso. He returns the gesture and dips his head to her shoulder, closing his eyes so he can simply feel her, inhale her, believe her when she murmurs against his chest, “I’m right here, Malcolm.” 

He does believe her, but he doesn’t let her go. He finds he can’t.

Malcolm has long prided himself on being Teflon-coated (during those two long years between losing the government and losing his job, he tried to be made of stone as well, but he learned after his fall from grace that stone crumbles under enough pressure), and to this day he’s skilled at keeping his true feelings largely hidden. Only Nicola can read his emotions fluently, and thank God she knows better than to try to pry them out of him (his first wife had tried that, and failed, on more than one occasion).

He remembers the first night Nicola had been home after the terrorist attack. When they had retired to bed after her reunion with the children, he'd hesitated to hold her like he usually does until she had insisted, and he'd obliged her, burying his face into the soft skin where her neck met her shoulder, trying to keep his emotions at bay because there'd been a terrifying span of time when he thought he'd never get to do this again. And Nicola had known it. Even through the post-traumatic maelstrom of her naturally frantic mind, she had realised that her husband had been through his own trauma, and she had taken his hand in hers — the one without the cast from her broken wrist — and laced their fingers together, the most intimate gesture she was capable of in that moment.

Only such a gesture could have allowed the fearsome Malcolm Tucker to cry. He'd done so silently and quickly, leaving just a few tears on the back of his wife's neck, recovering in order to hold her a little more tightly as she cried too, more forcefully, as is her nature and not his.

He assumed that was the end of his tears. She was back home, in their bedroom, in his arms, her injured wrist healing properly, and he was going to resume his regular position as Nicola Murray's Primary Support System, only more enhanced now that she had to cope with the loss of a member of her protective detail and the near-loss of her own life.

He'd once been able to keep an entire hapless political party from appearing as a complete and utter disaster in the British news media, so his current role was completely within his abilities, if not always his comfort zone. Besides, said zone had expanded greatly since he had developed a relationship with the woman he once called the Black Widow, the one he now calls his earth.

And so for weeks afterward, Malcolm was the rock Nicola needed, and she confirmed this not only to him but also to her therapist. During their first session, she tried to find an accurate yet concise way to characterise her husband before deciding the Scot could speak for himself. Not in person, of course, but via the three voicemails he'd left her in violation of MI5's rules while she was unaccounted for. Nicola had of course chosen not to delete them after she finally heard them, and she knew the therapist was professionally bound not to share anything his patients shared with him.

He had stifled a laugh at some of Malcolm's turns of phrase, then looked embarrassed but received an understanding half-smile from the Prime Minister. After the third message, he had taken a few seconds to process what he had heard, and Nicola had thoroughly agreed with his assessment: "Your husband has, shall we say, an unpolished way of conveying that he loves you, but it's quite clear he does."

As much as she understands the man holding her now, Nicola has never fully understood how he went from “you’ve got all the charm of a rotting teddy bear by a gravesite” to sincerely laughing at (some of) her jokes, from “you are a fucking waste of skin” to “until death do us part.” She doubts he fully understands it either, and both decided long ago not to question it.

Nicola likes to think she is used to everything about Malcolm by now, but he’s always been able to surprise her. She’s just used to nicer surprises. She is not at all used to the deliberation of his breathing as if he’s trying to stave off panic, something she’s far more used to experiencing than witnessing, or the grip she’s only felt once before — the way he held her as she wordlessly sobbed against him in the car that picked her up from Heathrow after she’d made it out of Russia, safe but shaken to the core. She found it both comforting and upsetting then, as she does now, and she can’t let it continue much longer.

“Talk to me,” she half-whispers.

“Hm?” He emerges from the depths of his thoughts, a place she rarely sees him go, so she adds some necessary strength to her voice.

“Talk to me.”

“I don’t think—”

“Malcolm,” she says just firmly enough to stop him, pulling back to meet his eyes, but keeping her arms around him and vice versa. “You insisted I talk to you. And if returning the favor means opening the liquor cupboard already, I’m fine with that.” She tries to lighten the mood with the ghost of a smirk, and she loosens her arms around him in case he wants her to follow through.

He doesn’t. He mutters, “That won’t be necessary” as he relaxes his own arms and guides her toward the sofa. He honestly wouldn’t mind a drink right now, and sure, whiskey had in fact been necessary for Nicola to acquiesce to Malcolm’s pleas that she let him in and tell her how she felt after her brush with death, after delivering the eulogy at her fallen SO1 officer’s funeral, after being forced to wonder what her husband and children’s lives would be like without her.

But he’s not going to present her with the same wall he’d had to scale, or tear down, or whatever fits best in this fucking vulnerability metaphor he’s somehow crafted as if he were the one in therapy, so once they’ve sat down and Nicola’s guided his head back to her shoulder with one hand in his hair and the other on his back, he envelops her in his arms again and starts talking.

“Y’know, back in the day, I thought bein’ powerless just meant bein’ the Opposition,” he begins. “Coalition talks failing, policy ideas goin’ nowhere, the Norman Shaw, all that fucking superficial procedural bullshit. I wouldn’t’ve guessed it meant not knowin’ if my fucking wife was dead or alive, and not being able to fucking answer that question when Ella asked me — the kids bein’ in fucking Florida made things worse — and fucking Ollie tripping over his words very time I tried to get a shred of information from him and the intelligence wankers, and even after you called to tell me you were alrigh’ and comin’ home, yeh still weren’t fucking home yet, and I couldn’t get yeh there faster. Couldn’t spin yeh back to safety. Couldn’t do fucking shit for the woman I love.”

He’s always been less verbal about his feelings than she has, and Nicola has been secretly hoping her ordeal in Russia will have the lasting impact of making her husband a little more forthcoming with the phrase _I love you,_ as he indeed has been lately. She hopes it will last without her having to tell him so.

That said, she’s always appreciated less direct references like this one, because they’re just so very Malcolm.

He shifts his head and places a chaste kiss on her neck. She thinks he’s done with his spiel until he whispers, “Thought it’d be longer before I’d have to imagine livin’ without yeh, pet.”

He falls silent, and Nicola tightens her grip on him.

They’ve been here before in a different context, years ago, after they had learned to get along but before they realised just getting along didn’t satisfy them. Nicola hadn’t understood at first what compelled her to be so gentle with the coarsest individual she’d met in her entire life, especially after she’d fought fire with fire over and over again for three years, until he’d let his guard down, and the part of her wondering if she was wasting her time on her political executioner vanished for good.

His government job had been not just his livelihood but his life, and without it he didn’t know who he was. She couldn’t relate, thankfully. She’d still been a Member of Parliament and a mother (and James’ wife, unfortunately) when she resigned from her first try at party leadership.

Contrarily, Malcolm had been utterly lost without anything to spin, anyone to bollock for a fuck-up, anyone to shove into or out of power, all in the name of the Party. He’d finally broken down in front of her one night and, to both their surprises, asked her to stay with him.

It was that vulnerability, that risk Malcolm took, that had shown Nicola she could reciprocate, that she could meet trust with trust, even though one of his final acts as a spin doctor had been betraying her. It was also the reappearance of the word _stay,_ with an earnestness she recognised from last time he used it, that convinced her he was sincere.

They had woken up in each other’s arms for the first time the following morning and decided they could get very much used to it.

All this crosses Nicola’s mind as she silently marvels, not for the first time, at how Malcolm’s notorious laser-focus has shifted from the Party’s reputation and advancement to her and her children’s well-being. He always needs something to focus on, something to protect. She knows he cares about all four of the kids, even Ben, who isn’t especially fond of him or her, though he’s been noticeably more amiable toward them lately.

Her thoughts drift to Ella, Malcolm’s favourite stepchild from the outset. If any of the Murrays besides Nicola could make him feel powerless if he couldn’t be of any help, it would be her second-eldest.

Nicola suspects Malcolm finds it strange to remember now that Ella Murray had been nothing more than a name to him back in her mother’s DoSAC days, just one of Glummy Mummy and that James twat’s four offspring. Ella had been a bully back then — not like Malcolm, because he was so much worse than that, but not entirely unlike him either — but she grew out of it, and both she and her stepfather have both gotten much better at keeping their heads in public, mostly for Nicola’s sake. Their mutual propensity for aggression made them kindred spirits of sorts, and as a result, neither had ever felt as awkward being calm around each other as they did around most others.

Nicola could say that Malcolm has been there for Ella quite a lot more than James ever has, but that’s not a great compliment and Malcolm knows it. Besides, her children’s useless father is one of the things they’ve tacitly agreed never to mention, along with several anecdotes from her tenure as Leader of the Opposition, in the sanctity of their holiday cottage.

Malcolm’s breathing has steadied, but not all the tension has left his body. Just holding him isn’t sufficient, and Nicola finds herself wondering how he would respond in her place, which he’s been in so many times over the years. She weighs her options and settles on good-natured teasing.

“You should know by now that I’m not so easy to get rid of, darling,” she says, running her fingers through his hair. The familiar motion soothes him a bit more.

It’s true, of course. They might never have ended up together if she hadn’t insisted on being a part of his post-government life, but Malcolm has calmed down enough to respond with a counterargument, trying to infuse some normalcy back into their dynamic.

“Stranger things have happened,” he says, and Nicola can tell he’s trying to sound less somber but can’t quite muster it. He’s set her up brilliantly, though, without meaning to.

“Of course they have,” she replies. “I’m the fucking Prime Minister, after all.”

A short burst of laughter escapes Malcolm. Nicola counts this as a victory, and for once her husband doesn’t try to one-up her. Instead he lifts his head just enough to place a kiss in her thick hair.

“I’m just sayin’, Nic’la, I didn’t beg yeh not to move to America almost twelve years ago just to lose yeh in Russia to some cunt with a vestful of dynamite.”

He trusts her to hear what he isn’t saying aloud. The days when they were both in government — shouting at and insulting each other to no end, plotting each other’s downfalls until Malcolm followed through and inadvertently brought himself down with her — feel like lightyears behind them. They’d each spent a fair amount of the early days and months of their relationship pinching themselves. It wasn’t news to them that they got along well outside a professional context, but the fact that they both chose to actively want and need each other despite their tumultuous history took some time to sink in.

Nicola does not ask Malcolm if his anonymous but traceably vitriolic comments about her to that Telegraph reporter who profiled her when she was Leader of the Opposition have crossed his mind lately. He does not tell her they have. They both know it doesn’t actually matter because she forgave him years ago.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Malcolm,” she says in a soothing tone she rarely takes with him. “What happened at G8 isn’t something anyone can foresee, or wants to, not even the all-swearing eye of Number 10.” She’s still the slightest bit lighthearted even with all the soothing, and Malcolm is willing to admit it works. “You’re not suddenly the most enormous tosser in Whitehall because you once thought you’d never feel more powerless than when we were the Opposition, or that you’d never experience a gut punch worse than being sacked.”

Before he can teasingly ask which time, since they both know the obvious answer is the second one, she quips, “Or maybe that one from Tessa Davis.”

He groans. “I should never’ve told yeh about that.”

Nicola chuckles. In her view, Malcolm knows so many of her embarrassing stories that it’s only fair she knows some of his, including the time the former PM’s wife decked him for a poorly-timed snipe at Tom.

“At least you haven’t told the kids. You haven’t, right?”

“Of course I fucking haven’t, Nic’la.” Malcolm’s voice regains its near-constant tone of exasperation for the first time since they arrived at the cottage, and his wife’s lips twitch with the beginnings of a smile as he continues. “Jesus, they’d never let me hear the sodding end of it.”

They share a brief laugh before Nicola returns to her point. “Do you get what I’m trying to say, though?”

“That I’m not the most enormous tosser in Whitehall? Well shit, that’s patently obvious, darlin’, Ollie and that cretin you’ve got running Transport have a fucking tosser monopoly over the rest of Westminster. You know that better than I do.”

He’s only deflecting out of habit and fully anticipates the look she gives him that says she’s serious despite her amusement. He answers her question first with a hand on her cheek, bringing their foreheads together and nudging her nose with his own, and then with words: “I do understand, pet.”

“Good,” she whispers, closing the gap between her lips and his.

They break apart after a long moment, if only so they can breathe, and sit in silence with their heads together for another long moment before Malcolm decides he’s got one more thing to say.

“I’m still coming with you on all your international jaunts from now on. Especially if you have to go back to fucking Russia. I’m not letting yeh go there without me again.”

Nicola leans her head on his shoulder now. “I’m the last person to argue with you about that.”

Malcolm’s hand finds her right wrist, finally out of its cast. “America, too. I’m still thinkin’ of ways to punish those Secret Service twats for being so fucking careless they broke yer wrist.”

“Oh, have you decided your ‘scrotum sandwiches’ plot wasn’t sufficient punishment?”

Malcolm laughs again, pleasantly surprised she remembers that particular tirade, since she’d been fresh out of Russia and exhausted when he delivered it. “You know I’ve always got at least one backup plan, darlin’, especially for threats of violence.”

“And you know I’m perfectly fine with you punishing them — as long as you don’t get arrested,” Nicola says with a raise of her eyebrows that Malcolm finds both irritating and endearing, as he finds most things about her. “What’s the point in coming abroad with me if you can’t come home because you’re stuck in Secret Service custody?”

“You and POTUS get on alrigh’, don’t yeh? Broken glass ceilings an’ all that. She’d be daft not teh do yeh a favor.”

He's only half joking, given his experience with under-the-table negotiations, and Nicola’s expression turns mischievous for half a second as if his harebrained idea might be plausible. She shakes it off, almost literally, and pulls him in for another kiss, a more insistent one this time.

“Remind me, darling,” she says when she pulls away, “didn’t we come here to enjoy ourselves?”

Malcolm’s voice dips teasingly close to a growl. “I’d rather enjoy you,” he murmurs against her lips before claiming them again.

Eight years into their relationship and six into their marriage, Malcolm still pinches himself every so often. Right now he’s in the firm embrace of Nicola Alison Murray — the Prime Minister, his other half and a known magnet for disaster — and he’s used to feeling at home with her, but in light of everything from her past blunders in Cabinet to her recent brush with death in Russia, right now Malcolm Tucker can’t remember a time he’s ever felt safer.

Stranger things, indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:
> 
> —Malcolm spent so much of the previous fic holding Nicola, so it only felt right for her to return the favor.
> 
> —Tricki established Malcolm as an awesome stepdad, and Ella as the Murray kid he's closest to, and I love those concepts so much that I had to mention them here.
> 
> —The Telegraph interview: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9528308/The-Thick-of-It-BBC-Two-an-interview-with-the-Rt-Hon-Nicola-Murray-MP.html
> 
> —As an American, I really hope I got all the British-isms and Malcolm's accent right.
> 
> —POTUS is Hillary Clinton in this universe, and again as an American, I can only imagine and sigh. Nicola's of course not the first female British PM, but she is the first _progressive_ female British PM, for all my fellow Americans whose knowledge of British government comes largely from TTOI.
> 
> —Tessa Davis' first name and infamous gut punch flashback are Tricki's creations. The nameless idiot in charge of the Department of Transport was my idea. Ollie can't be the only senior government official Malcolm enjoys bollocking these days.
> 
> —Did I use too many dashes in this fic? Probably. Do I care? Not really.
> 
> Comments are of course welcome. Thanks for reading.


End file.
